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17-01-2022 | Open Forum

A philosophical view on singularity and strong AI

Author: Christian Hugo Hoffmann

Published in: AI & SOCIETY | Issue 4/2023

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Abstract

More intellectual modesty, but also conceptual clarity is urgently needed in AI, perhaps more than in many other disciplines. AI research has been coined by hypes and hubris since its early beginnings in the 1950s. For instance, the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon predicted after his participation in the Dartmouth workshop that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work that a man can do”. And expectations are in some circles still high to overblown today. This paper addresses the demand for conceptual clarity and introduces precise definitions of “strong AI”, “superintelligence”, the “technological singularity”, and “artificial general intelligence” which ground in the work by the computer scientist Judea Pearl and the psychologist Howard Gardner. These clarifications allow us to embed famous arguments from the philosophy of AI in a more analytic context.

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From those sympathies, it cannot be inferred that we would embrace Gardner’s “theory” of multiple intelligences, MI, or take it for granted which would be premature given that it has engendered abrasive criticisms due to its apparently little experimental evidence (Waterhouse 2006; Herrnstein & Murray 1994; Traub & Gardner 1999). We do not engage in psychology here, a field where this author is not qualified to contribute to, but in philosophy. And what matters for our philosophical position is that Gardner’s proposal is grounded in a systemic perspective, which is what we embrace (not the complete or exact theory by Gardner). Of course, we invite readers to critically respond to this premise, i.e., our fundamental belief (in systemics).

The overly mechanistic and, thus, inadequate parlance to refer to the complex system “intelligence” aside (cf. Weaver, 1948, who shows that (organized) complexity and mechanics do not go together), the authors not only make one out of two routes to “greater intelligence” about speed (speeding up the hardware), but overall intelligence appears to be reduced to a speedup.

In the very first formulation of Moore’s law in 1965 the doubling was every year. David House, an Intel executive, raised it to 18 months, and ten years later Moore (1975) himself increased it to two years. As to the singularity, Moore (2008) himself says that it will never occur.

For instance, in respect to the controversy on singularity, Sandberg & Bostrom (2008: 15) assume that “brain activity is Turing-computable, or if it is uncomputable, the uncomputable aspects have no functionally relevant effects on actual behaviour”. According to Proudfoot (2012: 375), this assumption is mere speculation. Also Gödel seemed to be against computational functionalism (Wang 1996: 184).

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Title: A philosophical view on singularity and strong AI
Author: Christian Hugo Hoffmann
Publication date: 17-01-2022
Publisher: Springer London
Published in: AI & SOCIETY / Issue 4/2023
Print ISSN: 0951-5666
Electronic ISSN: 1435-5655
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01327-5

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